"Just one thing after another" - Unknown

Africa on YouTube

Can one individual can have a great impact on the image of an entire country? Who is controlling the message?

This is a post about my research project, Africa On YouTube. I started out by doing manual data gathering. As this soon got rather tedious, I began to look for ways in which to automate the process. Enter RSS.

So I scraped the YouTube RSS feeds using Yahoo Pipes.

I used Yahoo's automated term extraction to find significant phrased in the content.

Methodology.

The results were extracted from the RSS feed using automated means. Playlists were not included in the RSS feed. Thanks to this discovery, I've now been able to do larger scale data analysis.

The results.

A relatively small number of producers control the message. A Cuban rhythm called "Mozambique" consistently ranks higher than the country Mozambique.

YouTube includes 2 playlist results on each page. Because these playlists include a large amount of unrelated content, I've excluded these results. For the sake of simplicity, and because this gives more uniform results.

Problem: Little media coverage of small countries. Solution: We're all connected anyway so why not use social media? Using Facebook, Skype to create new journalism - highlighting stories from countries less covered by the media, translate, enlist the blogosphere, create a network. Covering countries Global Voices has no coverage from. Revenue model: sell stories to national media? Smaller than Estonia